not exactly sure where else to post this so I'm comenting on the podcast here. First GREAT SHOW as always full of usefull info, funny {to geeks like us anyway} and it's just plane nice to hear the way you guys get along.
HOWEVER I want to say one thing about the VIA banana. I am one of the ones who is saying it's going after the Raspberry PI, but not the Raspberry PI itself, it's for those of us {myself included} who misunderstood what the PI is. Alot of us thought "$25 dollar system, I'm gonna have one in every room and closet in my house as a HTPC," I believe Ryan was the one who kept saying "Double sided taped to a monitor" When the PI arrived we all had to realize, that's not what the PI is. It's basically the most complex educational toy ever made. And THAT'S AWESOME, but not what most of us older geeks wanted.
ENTER THE VIA BANANA, the board that I wanted PI to be. Low power, Low heat, simple to build a simple as fuck silent entertainment terminal for the bedroom tv, or a cheep bathroom computer for browsing on the john, or just a second basic pc for my wife to play her flash games on while I'm reading every word on the pcper.com and she is bored outa her skull.
If it has a full codec pack, can play videos from my main rig's network shared files, and has full flash suport, then this is exactly what it would take to build the full home network for us broke bastards who want a system in every room, but not have to try sleeping to the fans of a P4 buzzing 24/7.
Once again, GREAT SHOW, please never stop doing what you do so well!

Hey great show guys. I had a comment on the discussion of Amd's decision not to pursue top level cpus. Personally, I don't see anything different with this message than from Dirk, as Amd hasn't really competed on the cpu side in the past few years. This seemed to be more of a marketing angle than anything else, as they're trying to slowly position themselves to a new type of workload for their apu.

You guys are right that Intel could try to postpone this, but pay close attention to the next generation game consoles. If the rumors are true that playstation is using one of Amd's apus, that will be a huge win for Amd and ggpu programming.

A final note: I think it's a bit off-base to think that developers are impeded by technology. I think that's a common excuse and somewhat of a cop-out. The most innovation we've seen in games in the last few years came from Apple and Nintendo, both of which don't have the most cutting edge graphics hardware (though they do have some innovation in other aspects of hardware). This push for more and more graphics haven't really led to better experiences, and really is a trend that is unsustainable as the cost for producing this graphically intensive games exponentially increases. If games are going to improve overall, and be considered art, then developers need to focus more on the gameplay and experiences than pushing more polygons.